A
print such as La
Journée mémorable
de Versailles le lundi 5 Octobre 1789 [Image
7] (the
date was actually October 6th),38 showing
a synecdochical representation of the crowd, a group of eight
or nine armed men and a woman
returning from Versailles, is an example of complicit violence
alone. Whatever violence has happened is referenced by the
Swiss Guards’ heads held aloft. The decapitations
have occurred “off stage” at
Versailles. Impetuosity or “violence
of passions” might
be applied to this exuberant group, which parades across
the print. It is possible that these figures are not those
responsible for the actual murders, but the presence of the
bloody heads
makes the image a celebration of past violent acts, with
the revelers complicit in those.

The frieze format
of the print suggesting the movement of the crowd from left
to right also suggests order. More
importantly, by choosing to focus on a fragment of the crowd
of women, national guardsmen and ordinary male citizens who marched
back to Paris with the king in tow, rather than on the carriage
with the royal family within,39 this
artist actually presents a re-ordering
of the world. Pictured no longer is a hierarchy of groups or
individuals, as in earlier prints of city processions or religious
pageants.40 The royal family is ignored. Rather
this print privileges a group of unknown individuals, citizens
and guardsmen alike, who intermingle on their return to Paris. That
the role of women, so prominent in the October days, is reduced
to a single participant, who turns her back to the viewer, certainly
testifies to the printmaker’s
own bias, not shared by all who represented the event.41

Anticipatory Violence

Image 31. Bertier de Sauvignon,
l'intendant de Paris est conduite au supplice [Bertier de
Sauvignon,
Intendant of Paris, is Led to His Punishment]

The category
of “anticipatory violence” includes
works such as Prieur’s drawing, Bertier de Sauvigny,
intendant de Paris, est conduit au supplice, 23 juillet 1789 (Paris,
Musée Carnavalet) [Image
31].42 The
whole notion of anticipatory violence revolves around the theory
that an artist can indicate more than
one moment in an image. Repudiating the artistic credo of the
single instant promulgated earlier in the century by DuBos: “A
painting only represents an instant of a scene” [“Un
tableau ne représente même qu’un
instant d’une scène”],43 the
revolutionary artist accepted the beliefs of contemporary theorists
who proposed that several moments
could be expressed in a single image.44 Picking
up on ideas suggested by Pernety in the 1750s, Watelet, an honorary
member of the Académie des
Beaux-Arts, declared clearly in 1792:

Embedded in any image, according to
Watelet, are the past, the present, and the future.

In the Prieur
drawing, Foulon’s son-in-law, Bertier de Sauvigny,
is paraded through the streets of Paris by a crowd, one of which “offers” him
Foulon’s decapitated head.46 While
the presence of that head denotes the past, the inexorable movement
of the crowd from left to right
in the frieze-like arrangement of a pageant; the position of
Bertier in the cart towering over his captors but surrounded
by the points of bayonets; his ironic (but deliberate) placement
between the large wheel of the cart (an allusion to breaking
over the wheel) and the sculptural figure of a saint in the niche
to his right; and even the head of Foulon again are all signifiers
of Bertier’s
present and future. Although he fought back, Bertier
would eventually be hung, bayoneted, his entrails and heart removed,
his head cut off and mutilated.47

38 Parisian women actually departed for Versailles on October
5, 1789 and
returned the following day.

40 See
especially Robert Darnton, The
Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History, New
York: Vintage Books, 1985, chapter 3, “A
Bourgeois puts his World in Order: The City as a Text” and
his illustrations “A
Procession honoring the Spanish Infanta in Paris in 1722,” p.
106 and “A
Procession of Dignitaries in Toulouse,” pp.
110-111.

Both Barbara Day-Hickman and Joan
Landes in other essays in this forum discuss another print
illustrating the return to Paris, [Image
6].
Day-Hickman reads Journée mémorable de Versailles as
an ironic commentary deriding the triumphal parade of “public
women” while
Landes reads this as a glorification of the “modern Amazons.” Years
ago in an oral presentation, I agreed with Landes, but reviewing
both Day-Hickman and Landes’ accounts, it is evident that
the work is ambiguous. It could be read as a sexualization,
and thereby trivialization, of the political actions of women
during the October days. Yet, given the sans-culotte in the
center of the print who enthusiastically waves a branch and spreads
out his arms and who visually seems to push away the aristocratic
couple witnessing the “triumph,” I am inclined to support my original
opinion and view the work positively as the triumph of “nos
modernes Amazones.”

42 For
an illustration, see La Révolution
française. Le premier empire. Dessins du Musée Carnavalet,
Paris: Musée Carnavalet, 1982, p. 135, no. 120 and Vovelle, La
Revolution française. Images et récit 1789-1799,, vol.
I, p. 188. This never became part of the Collection complète
des tableaux historiques de la Révolution française. See
also Roberts, “The Visual
Rhetoric of Jean-Louis Prieur,” pp. 107-109,
which I read after reaching my own conclusions. Roberts (p.
109) states that in this work “Prieur has succeeded, as an artist,
in capturing the ritualistic dimension of a Paris journée.” Of
course, had events been different, had Berthier de Sauvigny
not been massacred, a totally new category, something called “arrested violence,” may
have been needed to describe the print.

46 On
Bertier, see Bruel et al., Collection
de Vinck, vol. II, p. 407, no. 2877. Bertier was arrested
in the outskirts of Compiegne and brought back to Paris.

47 A
drawing attributed to David’s student, Anne-Louis Girodet, Decapitated
Heads of marquis Delaunay, Foulon, and Bertier de Sauvigny,
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale,
Cabinet des Estampes is illustrated in Thomas Crow, Emulation. Making
Artists for revolutionary France, New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1995, p. 120, pl. 90. This shows not
only the defaced head of Bertier de Sauvigny but also his heart
on a stick.